The glory that is Screenplay kicks off this weekend, with a brilliant programme crammed with feature films, documentaries, short films, some truly amazing guests and the ever-popular Home Made screening. Mareel will be closed all day on Monday 3 September for staff training, and then our regular screenings start again on Tuesday 4th.
And what a packed month September is, with something for absolutely everyone! For action fans there's Jason Statham battling a giant shark in The Meg, Denzel Washington out for revenge in The Equalizer 2, and Tom Hardy lookalike Logan Marshall Green given extraordinary physical abilities by an Artificial Intelligence implant in futuristic thriller Upgrade.
If you're after a laugh you can choose from The Spy Who Dumped Me, starring Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon as two best friends who are thrust unexpectedly into an international conspiracy, The Festival, a hilarious comedy from the creators of The Inbetweeners, King of Thieves, based on the true story of the gang behind the Hatton Garden robbery and starring Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent and Ray Winstone, The Happytime Murders, an outrageously filthy comedy starring Melissa McCarthy and a cast of puppets, Dog Days, in which the lives of various LA dog owners intersect in unexpected ways, BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee's blackly comic drama based on the true story of an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, and The Seagull, a witty new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's classic play starring Saoirse Ronan, Elisabeth Moss and Annette Bening.
There's plenty on offer for families, with Ewan McGregor starring alongside Pooh and the gang in Christopher Robin, Kodi Smit-McPhee starring alongside a wolf in epic adventure Alpha, a 12-year-old boy starring alongside a trio of wacky extra-terrestrials in Luis and the Aliens, a whole cast of crazy creatures in beautifully hand-drawn animation The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales, and the return, by popular demand, of the brilliant Incredibles 2.
We're launching Teenage Flicks, a brand new strand aimed at young adults, with a different film every fortnight and £5 tickets for teenagers. Kicking off the strand is futuristic adventure The Darkest Minds, based on Alexandra Bracken's best-selling YA novel, and hyper-modern thriller Searching. Next month we'll have heist movie American Animals and New York skateboarding drama Skate Kitchen – tickets on sale soon!
The list goes on! There's drama too, with The Children Act, starring Emma Thompson as a conflicted High Court judge, The Negotiator, an absorbing spy thriller set in Beiruit and starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike, Hurricane, which tells the true story of a group of Polish pilots who flew Hurricanes for the RAF during WWII, and The More You Ignore Me, a bittersweet coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl and her schizophrenic mother, written by Jo Brand and starring Sheridan Smith. And we haven't forgotten horror fans, with scares aplenty in Unfriended: Dark Web and the terrifying Slender Man.
In our Screen Horizons slots we've a Brooklyn-set indie charmer, a powerful British drama written and directed by a former Jehovah’s Witness, a Mafia mystery with a fairytale slant and a wonderfully absorbing tale of empowerment from Paraguay. There are documentaries about artist Andy Goldsworth and the New York Public Library, a spectacular performance of Puccini's beloved classic La Bohème on Sydney Harbour, and, in our Screen Classics slots, a glorious 40s noir starring Joan Crawford.
Find full details of all of these and more here – we hope to see you soon!
Jenny Leask
Cinema Programmer
